Walter Graham Arader III is an American art dealer, focusing on rare maps, prints and natural history watercolors.
He graduated from Yale University in 1972. He played No. 1 singles on the varsity squash team for three years, and spent much of the rest of his time at Yale exploring the map holdings of the Sterling Memorial Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The curator of the Yale map collection, Alexander O. Vietor, became his mentor. [1] He married Vallijeanne Hartrampf in 1983. [2] His son, Walter Graham Arader IV, is married to British fashion writer Tatiana Hambro. [3]
Shortly after graduation, he began a short-lived career as a tree surgeon. Two years later, his father, a Philadelphia businessman, former Pennsylvania Secretary of Commerce [4] and map collector, lent his son one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and Arader began to travel the antique-show circuit.
He established his business in 1974, focusing on rare maps. In The Island of Lost Maps, author Miles Harvey credits him with transforming what had been an "insular realm of aficionados," giving maps "unprecedented visibility, not only as investments... but as mass-media artifacts." [5] Arader has brought a similar acumen to the sale of natural history prints, books, and watercolors, and he is the largest dealer of John James Audubon's highly prized double-elephant folio prints from The Birds of America.
In 1981, he introduced the Arader Grading System to determine the value and significance of rare maps, prints, and books. This system evaluates items based on their conceptual importance, aesthetic quality, condition, and rarity. He also invented a method of selling by syndication, a form of retailing with an added touch of gambling. For a fixed amount, clients purchase shares in the distribution of a set of prints or watercolors. By process of lottery, numbers are drawn to determine the order in which clients make a selection. Such a method was used by Arader in the fall of 1985, when he bought the original watercolors for Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s masterpiece, Les Liliacées. Sotheby's had planned to auction the flower watercolors one-by-one, but Arader created one of his syndicates and in a remarkable coup purchased the whole group with a single unchallenged bid of five million dollars. Each of his investors acquired four watercolors for a share price of $63,250. [6] One of Arader's biggest clients was Steve Jobs, who obsessively collected Redouté roses. [7]
He was profiled in the October 24, 2011 issue of Forbes magazine. He is discussed by Sarah Vowell in episode 86 of This American Life , and in her book The Partly Cloudy Patriot , and by Simon Garfield in his book, On The Map .
Arader currently owns galleries in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, New York City, NY, and St. Helena, California.
Pierre-Joseph Redouté, was a painter and botanist from Belgium, known for his watercolours of roses, lilies and other flowers at the Château de Malmaison, many of which were published as large, coloured stipple engravings. He was nicknamed "the Raphael of flowers" and has been called the greatest botanical illustrator of all time.
Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, at Rockefeller Center in New York City and at Alexandra House in Hong Kong. It is owned by Groupe Artémis, the holding company of François-Henri Pinault. Sales in 2015 totalled £4.8 billion. In 2017, the Salvator Mundi was sold for $400 million at Christie's in New York, at the time the highest price ever paid for a single painting at an auction.
Sotheby's is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and maintains a significant presence in the UK.
Charles Thomas Close was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits using a very large format camera. He adapted his painting style and working methods in 1988, after being paralyzed by an occlusion of the anterior spinal artery.
Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach was an American collector, scholar, and seller of rare books and manuscripts. In London, where he frequently attended the auctions at Sotheby's, he was known as "The Terror of the Auction Room." In Paris, he was called "Le Napoléon des Livres", which translates to "The Napoleon of Books." Many others referred to him as "Dr. R.", a "Robber Baron" and "the Greatest Bookdealer in the World".
The Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in central New Haven, Connecticut, houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts reflects the development of British art and culture from the Elizabethan period onward.
Paul Rosenberg was a French art dealer. He represented Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. Both Paul and his brother Léonce Rosenberg were among the world's major dealers of modern art.
The Birds of America is a book by naturalist and painter John James Audubon, containing illustrations of a wide variety of birds of the United States. It was first published as a series in sections between 1827 and 1838, in Edinburgh and London. Not all of the specimens illustrated in the work were collected by Audubon himself; some were sent to him by John Kirk Townsend, who had collected them on Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth's 1834 expedition with Thomas Nuttall.
Edward Forbes Smiley III is an American former rare map dealer and convicted art thief. He was found guilty in 2006 of stealing 97 rare maps originally valued at more than US$3 million, and sentenced to 42 months in prison.
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Swann Galleries is a New York City auction house founded in 1941. It is a specialist auctioneer of antique and rare works on paper, and it is considered the oldest continually operating New York specialist auction house.
Prentiss Taylor was an American illustrator, lithographer, and painter. Born in Washington D.C., Taylor began his art studies at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, followed by painting classes under Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and training at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1931, Taylor began studying lithography at the League. He became a member of one of the most important printmaking societies in America at that time, the Society of American Graphic Artists. Taylor interacted and collaborated with many writers and musicians in his time in New York in the late 1920s and early 30s. This was in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Among his close friends and colleagues were Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.
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Choix des plus belles fleurs is a book of watercolors by the Belgian artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté. It has 144 color pictures reproduced by copperplates.
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The year 2022 in art involves various significant events.
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